Saturday, April 5, 2008

My Letter from James Carville

James Carville is the reptilian Democratic political consultant who oversaw Bill Clinton's victory in the 1992 presidential election. Since then, he and his partner Paul Begala have been hanging around the Democratic Party like a bad smell. In 2000, he and Begala penned a noteworthy piece in the Washington Monthly in which they urged Vice President Al Gore to choose Zell Miller as his running mate. Gore didn't choose Miller, but his actual choice, Joe Lieberman, proved to be the next best thing; he has chosen to follow in Miller's footsteps by giving the Democratic Party the middle finger and giving a great big Democrat-bashing speech at the Republican National Convention.

More recently, Carville has been omnipresent on the cable news networks, pontificating on the state of the Democratic primary race. The fact that he was actually a Hillary Clinton partisan, rather than the objective observer that he and the cable networks liked to pretend he was, led to his suspension from CNN after repeated complaints from the Obama campaign. Carville's most recent brush with notoriety came last month, when he responded to Governor Bill Richardson's endorsement of Obama by comparing him toJudas Iscariot.

And now, Senator Chuck Schumer, chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, has enlisted Carville's help to raise money for the DSCC. I got a letter from Carville today asking me to donate to the DSCC, and presumably this same letter went out to hundreds of thousands of other Democrats, the majority of whom are likely to be Obama supporters.

I can sort of see why Schumer would pick Carville, since the two of them are both high-level Hillary supporters. But you have to wonder how out-of-touch Schumer has to be to use such a divisive figure to try to solicit money. If I had been inclined to send the DSCC some turkee, this letter would have made me change my mind, and I can't imagine that the legion of Obama supporters who are also receiving this letter are going to feel any different.